- Project Runeberg -  Impressions of Russia /
198

(1889) [MARC] Author: Georg Brandes Translator: Samuel Coffin Eastman - Tema: Russia
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the style of the older seers and bards, whom he in other
respects admires. In the next place, you feel that his
love for the poetic art is not less strong than his
admiration for the deeds of the princes of his day. He is an
enthusiast for poetry. It is, as he expresses it, his
intention to free himself from the poetic traditions; he does
not wish to borrow from his predecessors “the old words.”
From the bîlinî we can see what he meant by this.
There is found in them, just as in the Homeric poems,
a standing supply of descriptive epithets. The
mountains are always gray, the sea always blue, the sun
always red. The earth is our mother, the damp earth.
They always run on their swift feet, always take another
by his white hand, etc. The unknown poet has plainly
wished to adopt as little of that as possible. Nevertheless,
we meet in him certain constantly recurring expressions
which are evidently inherited, as, to drink the Don
dry with his helmet, to set ten falcons on a flock of
swans, to sow the earth with human bones, and certain
constantly recurring epithets, as, Vsevolod, the wild bull,
the falcon Igor, and his son the young falcon, and others.

As a man, the author of “Igor’s Campaign” is far milder
in his emotions than the author of even the mildest of
the heroic poems of the Edda, “The Songs of Helge.”
The style in which, in his poem, Yaroslávna expresses
her longing for Igor during his absence in the war, and
her fear for the life of her lover, is more like Ingeborg’s
languishing lamentations in Tegner’s poem than it is to
Sigrun’s loss of Helge in the Edda. And the whole life
of emotion and nature, which the nameless poet has
spread out before us, makes an entirely characteristic
impression, by the grand, childlike simplicity with which
the association between man and nature is interpreted
and described. The whole of nature is alarmed when

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